Baalbek

Andrew and I had our first fun and festive New Year’s Eve celebration in Budapest last night. We celebrated with two other couples at the Baalbek Lebanese Restaurant located inside the Buddha-Bar Hotel Klotild Palace. We ate an Arabic Style Gala dinner listening to live music and enjoyed the belly dancing show.

Our new friends kindly invited us to their gorgeous apartment near the Parliament for cocktails. After we spent some time drooling over their gorgeous apartment and Danube River view, we headed off to the Baalbek for dinner around 7pm.

The Hungarian Parliament Building on New Year’s Eve.

Buddha Bar Hotel Entrance

New friends in Budapest. Such wonderful ladies!

Andrew enjoying the show. It was a thrill to experience something out of the ordinary for New Year’s Eve.

The Klotild Palace

The Klotild Palace is built in a British neo-baroque, eclectic style in the 5th district of Budapest, at Ferenciek Square. Princess Marie Clotilde, the wife of Archduke Joseph Karl had the palace built in the 1880s. The building’s glass windows were made in the workshop of Miksa Róth, while the 48-meter-high towers are adorned with an enlarged replica of the archduke’s crown. It is the first building in Budapest to be fitted with an elevator. With various uses over the past century, the Buddha Bar Hotel was opened in 2012.

New Year’s Eve Dinner

Since it was my birthday celebration as well as New Year’s Eve, Andrew let me decide to where to go for dinner. One of the reasons I picked Baalbek was because we had never experienced Lebanese food before. It definitely wasn’t a typical New Year’s Eve dinner at the yacht club…

For our appetizers, we feasted on a gorgeous platter of hummus, moutabel (eggplant cream), beetroot, tabbouleh (parsley salad), kibbeh, grilled salty cheese and spicy lamb sausage. Not surprisingly, I ate every last bit of this offering, but my British husband skipped a few suspicious looking items.

Incredible food at the Baalbek Lebanese Restaurant

Our second course was lentil Soup with sumac and scallop. Lentil soup is a tradition here in Hungary. It is typically served on New Year’s Day and can be found at most restaurants. The traditional goes that if you eat lentils – a symbol of money coming your way for the coming year – abundance in all worldly goods will accompany you in the New Year. *fingers-crossed*

The main course was a choice of meat or fish and we both had beef tenderloin with potato gratin and green pepper sauce. It was followed by a coconut & rose water cake with raspberry sorbet. I enjoyed the sorbet but strongly disliked the cake. Luckily, Andrew loved it and ate mine too.

Coconut & Rose Water Cake with Raspberry Sorbet

Happy New Year

Thanks to my husband, my family and my friends (old and new) for making 2017 a fabulous one! We are finally moved into our new apartment and our things will arrive from Canada in a couple of weeks. I am looking forward to more adventures in 2018.

What did you do for New Year’s Eve? Let me know in the comments below!